YOUNG Daniel Yates is looking forward to a sky-high treat after his family won a balloon race.

Daniel, a Year One pupil at Stubbins Primary School, Rossendale, was amazed when he found out the balloon had made an incredible 800 kilometre journey across the North Sea to Norway in just 23 hours.

It was discovered by a Norwegian family in the back garden of their home in Vennesla still intact and almost fully inflated.

The balloon's Scandanavian trip earned five-year-old Daniel and another member of his family a 45-minute journey to the skies in a helicopter.

TV chef Andrew Nutter, the Edenfield restaurant owner who appears on the Channel 5 programme Utter Nutter, presented Daniel with his flight tickets during a ceremony at the school.

Organisers hoped the helicopter would be able to land in the school grounds before whisking Daniel away but the idea proved too expensive. Around 700 helium filled balloons were released during the school's spring fair. Tickets soon began coming back to the school, mainly from the North East, but staff were amazed when one arrived with a Norwegian postmark on it.

The balloon became something of a Norwegian "celebrity" after the local newspaper did an article on its discovery. A Norwegian journalist telephoned the school to get more details for the story in the Kristiansand newspaper.

Julia Hurst, secretary of the school's PTA, said: "The pupils were really excited that the balloon had made it so far. When you look at the map it's had to cross an awful lot of water to get there. We wondered how many more had simply dropped into the sea."

The school has created its own Web site on the Internet with the story and pictures. It can be accessed on:

http://visitweb.com/stubbins.

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